Adrien Gardère is helping the New Delhi art gallery to weave a unique story at its India Art Fair booth

For the first time, DAG New Delhi has collaborated with French architect and scenographer Adrien Gardère to design the display of its booth at the India Art Fair 2018. (Right) Nandlal Bose, Untitled (Esraj Player), 1937 and (Left) Abanindranath Tagore (1871-1951), The Dreamer, Water colour wash on paper, 1925

French architect and scenographer Adrien Gardère likens himself to an ikat weaver. He uses the threads of space, time, curatorial frameworks, and artefacts to create meaningful relationships between a viewer and an artefact. He has been associated with several museum and design displays around the world, most notably The Louvre Lens in France. And now, he is weaving a unique story at the India Art Fair 2018, where for the first time ever he has designed the display of a gallery’s booth.

For the first time, DAG New Delhi has collaborated with French architect and scenographer Adrien Gardère to design the display of its booth at the India Art Fair 2018.

This is a collaboration with New Delhi-based DAG, which is showing Navratna: Nine Gems at the fair, as a tribute to India’s national treasure artists such as Raja Ravi Varma, Amrita Sher-Gil, Rabindranath Tagore, Nandalal Bose, Sailoz Mukherjee, and more. The open-plan design for the space, spread across 128 square metres, features hints of India’s famous jaali or lattice work. “Using jaalis as theme gives the design an Indian context, but in an international manner. This space could be anywhere in the world,” says Kishore Singh, head (exhibitions and publications), DAG.

According to Gardère, the jaalis haven’t been used in an excessive manner — the sort that one sees across monuments in India. They are just evocative of a certain transparency, offering a mere glimpse of all that the booth promises within. “They lend a certain porosity to the design. As a viewer, you don’t get to see it all from the outside, hence you want to come in and see more,” he says.

For the first time, DAG New Delhi has collaborated with French architect and scenographer Adrien Gardère to design the display of its booth at the India Art Fair 2018.

Over the years, displays have become very important at fairs, around the globe, affecting the way visitors and potential collectors see the artefacts. For instance, at Art Basel Miami 2016, Perez Art Museum created a fun vibe for the retrospective of Argentine-born artist Julio Le Parc, complete with walk-through mirrored installations and wind machines. “And now that the MCH Group has a stake in the India Art Fair, maybe DAG wanted to celebrate that and demonstrate that a similar approach could take place in India,” says Gardère.

Also, the fact that 2018 marks 25 years of DAG, the team wanted to do something different for the booth. “It’s not just about curating a show or hanging a painting, but about conveying the curatorial framework in a more physical way, using the only tools that visitors possess, which are legs and eyes,” he says.

The challenge was to conceptualise and execute the space design within a limited timeframe. There were certain important questions to be answered, at the very onset of the project: how to create sufficient intimacy for each of the nine artists? How does one arrive at the booth and what is the first thing that you want to be seen? How hidden or protected do you want, say, Raja Ravi Varma’s iconic Yashohda and Krishna to be? “We didn’t want to have a blindfolded, introverted, solid booth. Hence, the use of jaalis,” says Gardère. Also, it’s a rare sight to have booths that don’t feature artefacts on the outside walls. “This immediately creates a breathing space and an exclusive environment for the viewer, wherein his or her relationship with the work becomes important,” says Singh.